Pragmatic Fossilization Of Apology Strategies In Chinese EFL Learners

Fossilization, as a universal phenomenon in language development and a huge barrier for successful language learning, has attracted widespread attention among SLA researchers. However, most researchers in China probe into fossilization at the level of linguistic forms: phonological, semantic or syntactic, while neglecting that nonnative speakers may also systematically use certain forms inappropriately at the pragmatic level of communication and incur pragmatic fossilization in their language learning processes.Comparison research in interlanguage pragmatics has shown that L2 pragmatic knowledge is incomplete for many learners, even those at higher levels of proficiency (Kasper & Rose 1999; Kasper & Schmidt 1996). This investigation contributes to the research in this area and provides information about the existence of a fossilization phenomenon in advanced Chinese EFL learners on the pragmatic level.This thesis attempts to investigate the phenomena and causes of pragmatic fossilization of Chinese advanced English learners, with apology speech act being the research target and by adopting the extended discourse completion test. The statistical analysis results show little evidence of improvement among the three groups of Chinese EFL learners while a great gap lies between the English majors'pragmatic competence and the native speakers', which manifests the existence of pragmatic fossilization. To be more specific, even advanced Chinese EFL learners do not use English Speech acts of apology as appropriately in communication as the native speakers do.Based on the analysis of the learners'data, this article proposes that pragmatic fossilization and unawareness of the cross-cultural differences cause the fossilization and there should be some improvement in college English teaching.